Lately I’ve had this struggle going on in my heart knowing how hard it is for these kids that I’ve been blessed with to look at us as a family. They already had a family. They had a mom and dad and I was not a part of it just 3 short years ago. Though the situation wasn’t a great one, it still was perfect to them. That’s all they knew. It was “normal” and I’m sure that normal was perfect enough!
Fast forward to now and they have a woman they just met a year ago living in their home and their “family” looks totally different. In fact, calling it a family at all is probably a struggle for their hearts.
So as women, we want to solve the problem! We want to be the solution. We want to make everything better. So I started to ask myself, how do I fill the void? How do I help make this normal? How do I help their hearts open to seeing us as a family now too? I start day dreaming about different things we could do. I thought “Beauty and the Beast and lunch would be a great Sunday afternoon.” I tell my husband about my convictions and he says “let’s do it!”
Excitedly, that Sunday we get to the theater after church and the ticket clerk looks at us and says “only row 1 is open for the next 3 showings.” Awesome. There went my perfect Sunday afternoon. So we get back in the car and bowling becomes the next idea. The kids didn’t seem nearly as excited but we pull up to the bowling alley anyway only to find out that it’s “league day.” Wonderful! What now? The little one is getting fussy and the other two are hungry so we decide “let’s just do lunch.” We struggle to find a place everyone agrees on but eventually we did. As we are sitting there, all feeling pretty defeated, an idea pops in my head! “Let’s bake!” Back at Christmas we talked about baking Christmas cakes and never did. Everyone got excited. We decided to have a contest and you could pick your own theme for your cake. And then once we were done baking we’d have my sister in laws family come over to judge! They agree to be part of our fun! We were judged on 3 categories: taste, creativity and best looking. Everyone started looking on Pinterest for ideas. We rushed after lunch to Target to get baking supplies and off we went!
We literally laughed for hours in that kitchen. We started baking at 3:30, the contest was at eight and everything was over and cleaned up by 10. Though it was a late night, it was certainly a Sunday well spent. And it’s days like those that make memories for a lifetime! And who knows, it may one day have those kids introducing us as their “family.”
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